Exit West

A New York Times BestsellerWinner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for FictionWinner of The Aspen Words Literary PrizeIn a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet -- sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors -- doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through . . .

Product Information

Reviews

As with the very best literature, its crystalline readability fast eclipses its topicality * Mail on Sunday *

Publisher's description. In an unnamed city swollen by refugees, two young people fall in love. One day soon they will have to leave their homeland, running for their lives, searching for their place in the world. * Penguin *

Powerful, vivid, poignant... Hamid is the master * Sunday Times *

Writing in spare, crystalline prose, Hamid conveys the experience of living in a city under siege with sharp, stabbing immediacy * Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times *

A love story as spare, haunting and spiritually powerful as a haiku. All my life I will remember Nadia and Saeed, their humanity against a surreal, broken landscape. Exit West is Hamid's finest book -- Kiran Desai Imaginative, inventive, graceful... Hamid exploits fiction's capacity to elicit empathy and imagine a better world * New York Times Book Review *

A subtle and moving examination of how human relationships endure and falter under unimaginable pressures. Exit West is an instant classic * GQ *

Impressive... Exit West confirms Hamid's reputation as a brilliant ventriloquist who is deeply engaged with the most pressing issues of our time -- Andrew Motion (Book of the Week) * Guardian *

Astonishing -- Zadie Smith

Immediately canonical * New Yorker *

Part pared-down romance, part 21st-century fable, Exit West is a thought experiment that pivots on the crucial figure of this century: the migrant * Financial Times *

Exit West packs such an emotional wallop you will be thinking about it for days afterwards. For Hamid is not only telling a story, he is asking what sort of a world we want to live in. * Editor's Choice, the Bookseller *

It's a terrific, beautifully constructed, important novel of our time. This is what we expect fiction to do: to examine our age but also to cast an eye on the past and - very brilliantly in this case - on the future too. I love it. * Mirza Waheed *

Exit West is a masterpiece. It stretches the boundaries of the real just enough to make a point about the state of immigrants and refugees in the contemporary world. But it's very much grounded in reality. It's a beautiful book. * Michael Chabon *

Mohsin Hamid is one of the most talented and formally audacious writers of his generation * Telegraph *

A man born to write -- Dave Eggers

The voice of a changing continent. A writer at the top of his game * Metro *

Author description

Mohsin Hamid writes regularly for The New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of Exit West, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Discontent and its Civilisations. Born and mostly raised in Lahore, he has since lived between Lahore, London and New York.